Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds & VR

Friday, February 20, 2004

Nick Rhodes, Second Life's only known Frenchman, owns an airy art gallery in Tan,
where he exhibits elegant photos of glamorous women-- taken by him, and
other photographers of the beautiful female form who are of his
artistic caliber. (At least, in deference to Michi Lumin, as female beauty is traditionally defined.)

However, I'm not here for the art, right now. I'm standing on the
deck of his gallery, trying to figure out the meaning of this bonfire
of desire in front of me. A grand piano, an animal skin rug, an objet
d'art, gold-trimmed bathroom fixtures and oak furniture, a slideshow of
Nick with a series of lovely women, all thrown together into a pile and
set ablaze. An anonymous tipster brought me here, but neither Nick or
anyone else is nearby, at the moment, to explain the meaning of these
burning things. A scandal, a heartbreak, an aggressive
artistic/political statement? All of these things, none of them?

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

The gender politics of pulling up a chair (originally published here)...

Used to be, when female avatars and male avatars would sit down in
Second Life, they more or less sat the same: Hands loosely laid on the
lap, legs slightly apart. (Or as one resident waggishly put it,
“Sitting with your junk hanging out.”) This didn’t sit well, so to
speak, with many residents, especially some women. (And one assumes,
some male residents who play as women.) It just didn’t do to put on a
skirt or a dress, and attend an in-world fashion show, for instance,
then end up sitting more like a stevedore at a sports bar, than a
society lady. Quite a few complained to the Lindens.

The solution came last month. The Lindens implemented a tweak to
the default sitting posture for women. Now, when a female avatar takes
a seat, her legs and feet are kept together, and pointed at a slight
angle to one side; her hands are folded together, too, and placed on
the opposite thigh. So it was a decidedly feminine way of sitting.

A few women, however, weren’t too happy with this solution. Leading the protest was Michi Lumin:

“I give up. I'll put on mascara and saunter around daintily,” she
raged in a community forum. “I look like a prim and proper missy-miss
now, and have NO choice in the matter... What are you guys going to do
next, make us curtsy?”

After protest from her and a few others, the Lindens added a fix, so
that women who didn’t like the new feminized sitting posture could
revert back, if they chose, to the original, gender neutral position.

Michi, however, wasn’t too pleased with that workaround, either.

“It's pretty damned obvious that Linden Lab has made a judgment,”
she wrote in another heated post, “on there being a proper way for
women to sit and a proper way for men to sit, with a pacifier thrown to
the few complainers-- yeah, the few females on SL who don't want to
look like Barbie™ dolls.”

When I finally caught up with Michi, she was in Abbots, one of the
new simulators, and she wasn’t doing much sitting. For that matter, it
wasn’t even entirely clear if she was supposed to be a female then,
either. She was a purple dragon with samurai swords and leather pants
and a “Re-elect Richard Nixon button” pinned to her jacket. She was
busy helping build a new Cold War-era radio tower, the kind designed to
survive a nuclear attack. The plan her and her friends have is to
construct a bunch of these towers, across many sims, and install a
system of laser transmitters that communicate to each other via bursts
of light, which are then translated at the sending and receiving ends
into text. (In other words, it will be a much more elaborate way to do
what is already possible and easier via Instant Message. It’ll just be
a lot cooler.)

“What can I say,” Michi tells me, after she explains the project, “we’re geeks.”

She takes a break from jiggering with her purple laser, to demonstrate to me the source of her anger.

“I can't seem to get people past the notion that there are many
women who would never be caught dead in a skirt,” she says. Michi sits
down on a chair on the deck of a nearby luxury cabin. “Do you see how
ridiculous this looks?”